Adjectiveemphasized

Adjectiveemphasized is a term used in linguistics and corpus annotation to denote adjectives that carry additional prominence in a clause, through prosody, typography, or discourse-based focus. The expression is not a widely standardized label, but appears in discussions of annotation schemes and information-structure analysis to mark adjectives that function as focal or contrastive elements within a phrase.

In practice, adjectiveemphasized can be represented in data as a boolean attribute attached to the adjective token or as a dedicated feature in a syntactic or semantic representation. This helps researchers distinguish adjectives that bear special emphasis from those that are merely descriptive. Realization of the emphasis varies by modality: spoken language may use pitch accent, longer duration, or stronger stress; written text may indicate emphasis with italics, boldface, or capitalization.

Adjectiveemphasized often occurs in contrastive or focus-marked contexts. For example, in a discourse asking for a specific item, a speaker might say, The RED umbrella, not the blue one, highlighting the adjective to differentiate options. In such cases, the emphasis on the adjective contributes to the information structure by signaling new or contrastive information rather than generic attribute description.

Applications include corpus linguistics research on emphasis patterns, natural language processing tasks that account for focus in translation or sentiment analysis, and language pedagogy to illustrate how emphasis changes meaning. Limitations include the subjective nature of perceived emphasis, cross-linguistic variation, and the lack of a universal annotation standard. See also emphasis, focus, contrastive focus, and information structure.